The duo was initially formed out of Chicago's vibrant creative music community. In order to promote his debut cd, Sullender asked his occasional musical partner Kevin Davis to accompany him on an East Coast tour. They performed duo sets every night through the South and up to New York City (even playing in trio with famed electronic composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros in Kentucky) and honed and crafted their musical relationship. As a duo, there is the obvious cultural collapse occurring with the instrumentation of cello and banjo; a rare combination, as each instrument points to a very specific historical trajectory. While Sullender and Davis quickly bounce off each other, developing each other’s musical ideas, they navigate a common ground where new meanings can emerge. There is a tendency for them to play towards the romantic, incorporating simple major/minor melodies intended to evoke the emotional, but these gestures do not necessarily point to “folk” or 19th-century classical - they seem rooted in much larger cross-cultural currents. This is not a modernist development of the pseudo-ahistorical "non-idiomatic" free improvisation idiom, but an embrace of personal and musical histories where signs are recoded to reflect our contemporary situation.... and it rocks. Their first duo recording, "The Tempest is Over", is slated for release this November.